


Ways to Starve a Heart

by brokenmemento



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 11:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15435996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenmemento/pseuds/brokenmemento
Summary: Grace and Frankie have an unplanned emotional night of intimacy and they're both too scared to talk about what it means afterward.





	Ways to Starve a Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilbexi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilbexi/gifts).



> *From the prompt: “For someone who talks incessantly, Frankie has barely said a word to in almost a week. And it terrifies me.” Followed by the summary I posted and the request "Angsty angst with a happy ending."
> 
> *I was rewatching season one the other day, in particular, the episode "The Funeral." There was some heavy stuff going on emotionally, so I decided to take this premise and wedge it in between that episode and "The Fall." Hopefully, it's not too far off the mark of believability.

They’d walked to the car together in silence, the world around them ripping without sound. How does something break with no auditory indicator of its destruction?

Well, Grace knows. It happens. It occurs much too frequently, like forty year marriages crumbling to dust and dirt, like hearts scattering fragments on sidewalks in front of blue Studebakers.

There is a point to symbolism, you see. Perhaps the most powerful of all being the circle, signifying completeness and time unending. An example being the ring. It was too easy to take hers off, to let it fall and be buried under the detritus of other more important pieces. And while the point of it had fallen short on Grace’s part, it absolutely had not for Frankie.

Frankie, whose heart is capable of more than Grace has ever really seen. Capable of not only great compassion and depth but great sorrow as well. And if she wasn’t so sure she’s all but lost her own within her chest, she might even admit to feeling a tiny flutter of that same melancholy as she watches Frankie breeze past, the blue of the discarded scarf a cord waiting to be grabbed.

What do you say to a gaping wound, to an unhealing mark that doesn’t know how to mend? Inadequacy stills Grace’s tongue and instead of saying, _this too shall pass_ or _I feel some of it too_ or _I’m sorry I used the word ‘stuck’ instead of ‘chose’_ _because maybe I’m choosing every day that I stay,_ she doesn’t create a verbal balm to try and repair the ache.

When she finds Frankie out on their back porch, joint in hand and sea breeze dancing in her hair, she sits beside her and inhales the cannabis scent into her lungs. Chastisement is hard to come by inside of a day like today, when holding any ounce of decorum was just as vain as pretending the divorce and upcoming nuptials between their husbands are a dream.

The funeral exists as a rollercoaster between projected appearance and actual downfall. Robert and Sol get to be while Grace and Frankie get to grasp and claw for any sense of normalcy. They get to function at a symbolic level while the flip side tries to remember what representation even means. To have a life of choice rather than assignment.

It’s odd, how a pulse can smart. How beating and pumping can sting as badly as wind getting knocked from lungs. It’s what burns when Frankie injects the first words she’s given to several hours of passing.

“I’m lonely,” she whispers to Grace, a broken confession.

This all goes back to Sol. To her having to live the rest of her life without him. “I’m lonely” doesn’t mean _I’ve been lacking for forty years like you_ but “I’m lonely” means _how do I make it through until the end without him by my side?_ And while Grace would like nothing more than to ask Frankie just precisely what she wants her to do about it, she finds herself leaning over in the night and kissing the question to an internal pit where it will never be found.

Frankie isn’t a friend and really, she isn’t a person Grace knows past an acquaintance level. Learning her has always seemed so much more difficult than just learning to take her at face value without digging deeper. And perhaps that’s why Grace shuts her eyes with more force, to blind herself from the shock she knows is present because she feels it in Frankie’s body language.

 _I’m about to get decked_ , Grace thinks as she opens her lips to tease Frankie with the intention of her tongue. Because realistically speaking, that is what should happen next.

She jumps with a startle though when she feels the texture of Frankie’s tongue answering back, gasps when she feels Frankie’s fingers dig into the black material of her dress. With the absence of sound, so goes the way of good sense and sanity.

No, Frankie might not be a friend but since when did friendship become a prerequisite for physical intensity? Grace can’t quite remember an instance where it changed the course of anything, the glaringly silent critique of her past mimicking a bit of the now.

Talk is thin.

Grace doesn’t ask what Frankie’s doing when she feels her slip her fingers under the fabric at the shoulder of her dark garment, doesn’t let out anything but a breathy sigh when her lips graze across her neckline and collarbone. She doesn’t let forth the why as she practically glues the two of their bodies together as she guides them to the soft cushions on the outdoor couch.

Frankie’s hand snakes its way under and against and Grace would love to whimper but there’s nothing, just nothing but sensation. Cotton and silk and lace all vying to be the first to be stripped away and forgotten.

The stars twinkle-speak the secret being built to the next and soon, a million celestial sparkles know the truth of a floundering set of lives. The wind knows the contours of their naked skin on the salty air and how even in the striving for silence, how easy it is to hear a whispered death of a withering word or pant or sigh.

You don’t fuck restoration into being. It isn’t a thing that can happen. You don’t coax it from a soul who knows how to be damaged. It doesn’t magically disappear when fingers create quite new feelings in not so new places. Grace knows this as her hand meets the heat at the juncture of Frankie’s thighs.

And if this didn’t say a lot about herself, maybe Grace could take the time to think this is better and more, how muscles and nerves and skin and spine and bones create a body she finds she likes. Yes, for what it does but also how it touches and acts like it knows how to _just be_ against hers.

It’s Frankie and somehow that means both nothing and everything, her underneath Grace and letting Grace shock and stroke and smooth things out of her and against and into. It probably would be easier to tell her with verbal consolations, something along the lines of _I’m sorry you love Sol so deeply while I’m knee-jerking to being embarrassed by Robert_. And while Grace is no artist, she knows you need to have a little paint for a canvas and that’s Frankie down there, waiting to be created like one of her own works.

The confines of her drawer are too far and really, she hasn’t needed it in ages. Her own body is almost as foreign under her fingers as Frankie. So long has she gone without giving it what it could potentially have, what it has all but forgotten it likes.

And it likes to be fucked. Most of the time, slowly and sensually.

Grace deposits her fingers into the warmth of her own mouth to gain moisture because, like sound, it’s lacking too and when that does happen, all she knows to do is burn.

She lets her wet fingers connect and the old world that she knows disappears. Grace is good at pleasing others. She’s been doing it her whole life.

Frankie’s eyes are closed and mouth agape and when everything is functioning and Grace is hoping that her own bones and muscles and nerves in hands that had trembled with fear and excitement before, steady to bring joy and release, stalling time to drift into forever.

In the end, Frankie comes like a familiar stranger, a shape that yearns to be known. Grace rests her head between her breasts, smelling sweat and salt and feeling the rise and fall of every breath in Frankie’s chest. Her mouth holds, steadfast. The real truth stays locked, about how she wants to say, _I want to touch you again someday_.  

********************

The soul is like any other body part: it takes time to heal. And honestly, it was supposed to take longer than this for mending to begin on Frankie’s, but then it happened and now things are all screwed. Including herself.

Frankie usually quite likes idiomatic expressions for the sheer visual imagery they suggest. The one befitting her life right now would be amusing if not for the weight behind it. Yes, she’s in a pickle. Has been for days. It’s like a sour sleeping bag that wraps tighter around her as she watches Grace move about without much of a sense of purpose.

It’s been easy to not mention what happened between them. Hence the pickle scenario. Frankie catches brief moments with her, sure, but the substance behind them is lacking. She moves past with minimal plates of food and offers minimal sentences to minimal actions.

Frankie wants to tell her _I could feed you for another kind of hunger, I’ve thought about little except the look on your face that night,_ or _I don’t know how to be the old me after you._

She can’t diffuse the bombs with wit and sarcasm this time, can’t protect from this different kind of fallout. To be Frankie, but not really a Bergstein. To be a woman, but no longer a wife. To appear on the surface as maybe straight adjacent, but want nothing more than to connect to the female form. To kind of dislike Grace Hanson, but crave the touch of her skin.

Figurative language aside, Frankie can’t seem to find a way to get herself out of the conundrum she sees in front of her: tell Grace it meant nothing and move on (lie) or atrophy in stillness and want her evermore.

Walls aren’t made like they used to be. Flimsy at best for stifling noise, so it’s by no stroke of luck she manages to hear Grace on the other side, despite her shoddy sense slipping as time goes. Her whisper is inauspicious because of said wall, which Frankie can’t help but press tightly against at the speaking of her name.

“For someone who talks incessantly, Frankie has barely said a word to me in almost a week. And it terrifies me.”

Frankie’s heart lurches, stutters. Something is starting, something uncategorical. It’s Grace, which is sort of like an explanation in and of itself because Frankie is pretty sure she’s like the rest of the long line that’s been leveled and left in a wake. You don’t experience Grace without being changed by Grace, and while she should have known this, it’s too late to undo now.

Grace, with her blonde hair and tiny waist and long fingers, parting and thrilling Frankie beyond comprehension. It sounds like a good story, if only it were one. If only fiction could hold the narrative being created.

Frankie knows that date books sit forlornly in drawers, looking like redacted intel on government documents, that rugs are a little less full because of nervous energy being manifested in pointless acts. They’re both lacking, life looking like less. Sol’s gone, Robert’s gone.

But _they_ exist.

They exist and Frankie feels aches in lots of places for lots of reasons. She never imagined a life with Grace, but it is what it has become. She could have had her home, the comfort of it to envelope her in. But that house contained the weight of a past, which she had wrongly deemed beautiful.

She doesn’t know this new version of Sol anymore than she knew the past version of Grace. Both of the people she has shared her life with are changing, taking on a new form. While Sol is losing grip within her bit by bit, Grace is gaining ground.

At this, Frankie can’t help but think of their untimely accident, because that’s what it is. Was... Is. An accident. One that she can feel all the way to her bones, like it’s capable of stripping her with every remembrance and leaving her raw.

What do you do when compulsion overtakes survival?

When touching pale skin and running fingers through blond hair and smelling the mixture of Grace’s perfume and the rest of her body flashes like a movie reel on the back of Frankie’s eyelids every time she closes her eyes. No, she may not know this version of Grace, but she wants to and that’s one of the scariest feelings in the world.

So while the wall might be a barrier of sorts, it’s also letting a whole lot in. Resolution finds its way, even if Frankie herself has struggled. She leaves Grace to her conversation, taking more with her than she had when she arrived.

******************

It’s a night not discernible from any other really, except that in this one, Grace has a secret. One that feels like it might scorch a hole in her chest from the sheer magnitude of it.

Her fingers stick a little to the pages of her book, the humid air filtering in from the cracked window and the fan not doing an adequate job of cooling the room.

“Are we going to talk about the orgasm you gave me or just keep on pretending that’s something that never happened?” Direct. Straightforward. Said with a tone of snarky confidence. A wobble runs through it finely. 

Grace looks up from her book to see Frankie standing in the door, leaning on the frame. Her body language is holding a swagger her face is fighting against. Sighing, Grace throws it to the side and lays her glasses on the nightstand. She leans back against the pillows and crosses her arms. “Are we really going to do this?”

“Oh, honey. We’ve already done it. What I’m trying to do is figure out what it means.”

“What it means? It doesn’t mean anything,” Grace furrows her brow and tries to play off. To not admit the furtiveness growing inside.

She’d once heard a saying: don’t bury your heart. Keep it on the outside. There seems to be grave danger in doing so and saying such to Frankie, of all people, is the greatest risk of all. To go from avoiding her completely to needing her utterly isn’t the kind of life change she imagined at seventy, removed from a husband and a marriage she is slowly learning she wasn’t much invested in in the first place.

“Okay. Okay, let me process that.” Frankie sways back and forth on her feet, eyes closed and head tilted to the ceiling. “My inner self is speaking, yes, that’s what I hear too. Her mouth is saying no but her body’s screaming “take me now.” You’re at war with yourself, Grace. Even my subconscious can hear it.”

“You’re being childish!” Grace all but yells. “I’m sorry, okay? You were just so upset about Sol and our marriages…” She stops and takes a beat to listen to the “our” again in her head before continuing on. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“So your solution was doing me. Is that it?” Frankie challenges.

“What? No. I didn’t plan it or anything.” Grace rises from the covers and comes to sit on the end of the bed. Frankie has stepped in the room but hasn’t managed to make her way any closer, to actually have a conversation without a gaping space between them. “And come over here. It’s hard to talk about something when I can barely see you.”

“No!” Frankie interjects sharply and then flinches. Grace starts a little bit from the vehemence of her tone. She holds up her hands to Grace and waves in her general direction. “I...I can’t. I don’t...trust myself,” she stammers.

“What?” Grace says, astounded. Is Frankie suggesting…? Could she be…? “What do you mean, Frankie?”

“Oh, good gravy,” Frankie sighs and then looks at Grace. “You’re not Sol. You’re not even a man.”

“Last time I checked, I was already aware of both of those things,” Grace says dryly.

In a flurry, Frankie comes and plops down on the covers and turns to face Grace. Apparently, her earlier protestations have already dissipated inside of her. She peers down at Grace’s hand on the bed, the same hand that touched Frankie and did things to Frankie and suddenly she can feel the heat unfurling, wonders if Frankie is thinking of it too.

“Geez, Grace. Just look at you. You’re sitting there in basic pajamas and no makeup, hair is a little mussed…”

“Am I going to have to continue to listen to your checklist of crappy qualities about  how I look for bedtime?” Grace asks, exasperated.

“And all I can think about…” Frankie yammers on, as if Grace has said nothing. But then she stops and looks her in the eyes. “Is how much I want to do it again. You made me feel something I didn’t think I could feel with anyone else, something close to the shock I got forty years ago with Sol. The way you touched me, the way your lips felt.”

Grace has to clench her legs together, stupid involuntary body betraying her again, and her hands grip a thigh and the comforter. “Frankie…” she manages to croak.

“And what kills me to think about is that we just can’t do it again.”

“Oh,” Grace lets out. Why does it feel like her chest is collapsing? She brings a hand to it, trying not to let on that, _fuck_ , it hurts to hear. While not exactly planning on it, somewhere, in some part of herself, she’d wanted it to. And that’s why everything smarts right now.

“I’m still not over Sol, obviously. He really hurt me. I need time to deal with that. I absolutely shouldn’t have let what happened happen.”

“Oh,” Grace says again, dumbly. What’s to offer when a choice is turning into a nightmare?

“Maybe, someday, when I’ve healed. Maybe when the two of us learn how to exist in the same space without wanting to rip each other’s heads off…”

“I have a feeling I’m always going to have those types of moments,” Grace interjects.

Frankie laughs and despite herself, Grace does too. She feels as Frankie’s hand seeks hers and binds them together.

“We skipped a step, which is so freakin' easy to do with you. But I’d like to learn to be your friend before I learn how to be your lover.”

Grace feels herself nodding, a motion born of pure instinct again, because _damnit_ , she agrees. While she’d like nothing more than to take Frankie’s face in her hands, run her lips across the smooth surface of hers, press her body atop Frankie’s until the bed covers cradled them both, she knows she is right.

“That makes sense.” Even if Grace doesn’t want it to. Even if time wasn’t unraveling too damn quickly already and waiting would seem excruciating. She can do this. She has to.

“Okay,” now Frankie nods, looking a little unsure of the boundary she’s set in place.

It’s hard not to reach for her and kiss her, even if it isn’t “goodbye forever,” just “goodbye for a little while.” Wanting that from Frankie Bergstein is still an astounding thought, one she appears to have enough time to get used to.

“So what do we do until then?”

“Pretend I don’t exist, like you have in the past?” Frankie smiles, but it’s a hollow one. Grace feels it like a punch to her gut. Brianna’s right. Feelings suck. “Only now, we both know you know that I do. And that you’ve felt for yourself that I am.”

She has to bite her lip in order to stifle a cry rising. Leaning forward, she presses her forehead against Frankie, closes her eyes against the onslaught. A hand runs softly down her cheek and she shakes her head a little, not to dismiss the gesture but to fight the knowledge of waiting indefinitely to rediscover the woman in front of her.

“Who are you?” Grace whispers, trying to ease the tension with a joke but instead, sounding horribly lost and aching.

Frankie pulls away and tosses another knowing look to her. _I know what you’re feeling because I’m feeling it too_ , she says but with silence.

“I guess you’ll have plenty of time to find out, what with the divorce papers getting finalized soon.”

It’s like a sign pointing to a path worn smooth, one waiting to be walked and cultivated. Grace smiles, stands and touches the lamp, turning the world to darkness. “Give me tonight at least,” she says into the obscurity, reaching for Frankie’s hand again.

She waits, maddeningly so. Right as she’s about to give up, skin against skin. When she pulls, Frankie follows and folds herself into Grace’s space. A light, deep within Grace, stays-hope glowing, the future bright.


End file.
